. . . let’s mark a birthday. James Agee was born a hundred years ago today in Knoxville and died forty-five years later in a New York City cab, by which time he had written two novels, a couple of stories, scripts, lots of journalism, poetry, and that thing that still can’t quite be categorized, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, early on in which he writes:

While we were wondering whether to force a window, a young negro couple came past up the road. Without appearing to look either longer or less long, or with more or less interest, than a white man might care for, and without altering their pace, they made thorough observation of us, of the car, and of the tripod and camera.

The chaos doesn’t really seem to abate, or the noise to soften, or the dripping mess of stuff I dragged downstairs to organize itself, even in these dark mornings at the table, but it was Agee who best showed me exactly what you could do with words.

Laurence Bergreen’s 1984 biography is pretty good. Robert Fitzgerald’s memoir is intimate and moving. There is apparently a new biography being written by Dwight Garner (I forget where I noticed that), and we could use it. It would be splendid if Blake Bailey did Agee but you can’t have everything you want.

After wondering, when he heard of his death, why they were not better friends, John Cheever wrote in his journal:

I think, niggardly perhaps, that there may have been some imbalance between the relationship of Agee’s work to the people who appreciated it and the relationship of this work to everybody else’s work. I am sad to think that he is dead.

Am not sure this is entirely clear to me, but maybe Cheever is trying to get at that troubling sense that Agee was not as directed a novelist as he might have been, and that the “writer’s writer” aspect Agee’s work gets a bit tangled when you introduce the reading and buying public. Maybe he’s saying that while you might have loved the work, it’s ultimate importance may not have been as deep as, say, Cheever’s own. Cheever, of course, waffled between exaltation and denigration of his talent and self, and reputations waffle too, so let’s not choose. Besides, this was before A Death in the Family was published.

So, fine . . . Happy Birthday, Jim.

In the middle distance of the backyard stands an apple tree. For years it blossomed and bore fruit, a surprisingly decent harvest of small apples in the late summer and fall. It was sturdy, with two main trunks splitting away from each other about two feet up from the ground. When our oldest daughter was young, we had a swing tied onto one thick outreaching limb that grew horizontally toward the house. The swing came down one day when its rope snapped and our daughter fell; she was likely too old for it anyway.

The tree is old now and dying; dying more quickly these past few seasons, having lost most of its larger limbs, culminating in the removal of the farthest of its two trunks several years ago. It was sawed off in chunks, but we decided to keep the lowest five foot section attached as a post to string up one end of a hammock. When the strap broke some seasons ago, we forgot the hammock and just let the stump be. It gradually lost its bark and was shot full of woodpecker holes. Ants gnawed at the stump and mushrooms blossomed suspiciously at its base. Placing my hand against the post some weeks ago, I realized I could push it over without much pressure. I let it be.

Well, the tree took the expected big hit the other morning. It was a calm day, good for raking leaves, which a couple of workers were doing. At one point, I peeked out my shades to note their progress and saw one worker’s coat hanging on the topped off trunk. It gave me a strange pleasure to see the tree used that way. Later, after they’d gone, I toured the yard. A job well done. I didn’t pay any particular attention to the tree, but in the pile of hedge cuttings in the corner, I saw the trunk laying on its side. It had collapsed. Not, I’m sure, because of the weight of the jacket, but just because it was time.

One fall back when the children were young and the tree was healthy and blooming, I remember my wife’s cousin Rob, who was hearty then, too, climbing a ladder and culling the top fruit, while the girls, my wife and his and I, caught them and laughed. It was a memory that as a family we all associate with Rob, who died a young man six Octobers ago. The horizontal limb reaching toward the house is still there, the last one blooming, and blooming so well that each spring this less-than-half tree appears full and alive. But there are holes in its trunk, too, and ants and shelf mushrooms on it and on the ground around it. Each year we say that someday we’ll have to take the whole thing down. It will fall on someone, on one of the dogs, at night in silence, sometime. But not yet.

The bear in the pit is stupid for freedom,
rushing against your linked hands.

If you trap him there the game is stopped.
If he breaks the pit the game is stopped.
If he goes too far the game is stopped.

You take him by the hands, you love him up good.
He says he was a good idea gone bad,
a must-do inspiration that fizzled out,
and he recants his preposterous bearness.

You dance a little. The game starts up.
Now you’re the bear.